Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

[MadMaxHellfire]

the update arrived right when i was thinking about playing it again. so now all my mods are broken and it's going to take months for them to be fixed. if ever.

 

[Comte]

They fix the lag in this pile of dogshit?

 

[zapotec]

The scam citizen thread is in another section

 

[Perkel]

The scam citizen thread is in another section

haha fuck

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

Upcoming new tradition tree

I can't believe they're finally adding the Jewish race to this game. I wonder what their ships will look like?

 

[Ibn Sina]

I found this post tbat explains how much was cut from 1.9. Everybody focuses on the FTL types lost but so much more was gone and gutted from the game. I did not realize how scummy paradox gutted a lot of features to add them later as "new" feature in dlc:

Quite a lot has been taken away from the game. Since I've gone back and been playing 1.9.1 this past week I've noticed quite a few things that have been stripped away between then and now:

Cartesian co-ordinates. These are no longer used when possible (to save resources I assume), the following had to be cut:
1. Sensor Ranges (used to show as a dotted green bubble around fleets)
2. Auras (used to show as a fancy graphical bubble around stations)
3. Minefields/AOE damage (used to show as fancy mines with skull&crossbones/crossed wrenches)
4. Build anywhere platforms (Used to have a big bubble of space around them to prevent stacking)
5. Snares (Used to redirect enemy fleets to specific positions in a gravity well)
6. Culture (Used to be a bubble around owned planets and frontier stations. You owned anything inside your culture and could build there, allowing for culture bombs and tug-of-war between two empires as well as mixed ownership of systems - lacked a good UI to show predicted changes so it wasn't always clear what the impact would be of adding or removing a source of culture, so ideally would have needed a "show predicted changes" UI update to be perfect)
7. FTL (used to work on absolute distances, now based on number of jumps. Allowed for raiding and jumping behind enemy lines, hit&run tactics. Needed work to be balanced and fun for everyone)

The loss of FTL, though it was the thing the community at the time fixed upon was, perhaps, only a small symptom of what was actually lost. Like not being able to cook a meal (FTL) and going hungry because someone stole the fridge and all the furniture (Cartesian co-ordinates) and not even noticing that you can't sit down because you have no chairs anymore (no culture bombs, minefields, visible sensor ranges etc). Personally I often had the game set to use all the same type of FTL because it made each game feel different from the last while everyone still had a level playing field. The loss of FTL reduced my choices significantly but not my gameplay as I rarely made use of the asymmetric capabilities that no longer exists. The other losses however, they make the game feel shallower, the galaxy map less strategic, individual systems less beautiful and defensive preparations less tactical.

Combat features cut:
1. Medium and Heavy platforms (lost when Ion cannons were added. Would be nice to have something sturdier than wet paper, though the difference between small and heavy wasn't as dramatic as I would have liked considering how limited they used to be)
2. % damage reduction. (Used to come from armour, the conversion to ablative armour made all the weapons function completely differently. It used to be that corvettes could get 90% damage reduction from evasion - before tracking, battleships however could get 90% reduction from armour - before penetration, the balance and progression of combat designs from anti-evasion to anti-armour as well as the rock-paper-scissors nature of combat was broken and rebuilt... It did need work and balancing, but it lost much in the process)
3. Slots that can be switched between power/armour/shields (power slots are now missing making it less of a choice and making some ship weapon+shield loadouts impossible due to power limitations. It used to be you'd start the game with empty slots and gradually fill them with tech advances, more reasons to open the ship designer and more ship designs possible)
4. Starting Weapon tech choices (you had a choice between 1 of the 3 weapons. This made you specialised from the start and making you put more effort into being a good all-rounder. It also made each empire feel unique and gave a reward for early wars as there would be more unresearched debris)
5. Starting Defensive tech choices (you didn't have shields at game start and had to pick which between shields and armour you wanted to get first, though the usefulness of the two wasn't equally balanced - much like the current evasion cap, armour had the opposite but equal damage reduction for large ships, making armour an overpowered late game investment rather than an equal choice early game)
6. Combat speed (your ships moved lightning fast in general, but slowed once combat starts making range more important. Now we have 1 speed in and out of combat. This made ships blunder into range and for fights to become deathballs rather than two slowly approaching walls of fiery death, which looked cleaner and was easier to read the flow of battle)
7. Combat resources. (Your territory used to have 1 or 2 rare resources related to combat, often giving you a monopoly on for example, +% kinetic weapon damage or +% armour. This encouraged specialization to maximize your advantage. It also encouraged wars as each empire would often have a unique reward for beating)

Economic features cut:
1. Frontier stations provided bubbles of control over nearby systems. (Used to have upfront and ongoing influence cost for claiming territory away from planets, limiting expansion and keeping vast areas unclaimed throughout the game. These stations could be destroyed in warfare causing areas to become neutral. Now only happens with crisis factions attack rather than during all wars)
2a. Leader Influence costs (Used to be worth 50 influence. Free leaders from events were far more valuable, it was prohibitively expensive to re-roll for the perfect leader. Sub-optimal roleplay and tech specialization was encouraged.)
2b. Leaders had a hard cap (You couldn't spam an admiral for every fleet, governor for every system, general for every army and scientist for a science ship above every world. There were hard choices. Free leaders allowed you to exceed the cap, so when these exceptional figures died they were literally irreplaceable)
2c. Leaders had stars for xp levels, anomalies had a minimum requirement and failure chance (Silly thing, but I loved those little stars. They also died a lot thanks to the failure state for many anomalies being rather meanly written. This was annoying but it made researching anomalies a bigger risk with big rewards)
3a. Planetary colonization had an influence cost (making spamming colony ships less easy)
3b. Colony ships had a large energy cost (10 energy, which was a significant amount considering the lower resources in general. Probably equivalent to around 50+ energy in the 2.7.2 economy (we get more energy from trade, more and higher output jobs and all stars give energy when most were empty before)
4. Edicts. Toggles with an ongoing influence cost, as well as timed planetary ones with a lump cost. I miss these. The planetary ones were great for a sudden deficit, you could supercharge energy output for a few years while your ships are undocked for example. While Military edicts could be toggled on for the duration of a war. The new system is less dynamic and reactive, with fewer choices and fewer influence sinks.
5. Factions. These could be upset with you and produce no influence. They could rebel, and liked to do so.
6. Happiness. This used to dramatically alter the output of a pop. You cared when pops were red, you could also see it.
7. Habitability. This capped the max happiness of a pop. You really cared about low habitability.
8. Terraforming. This happened and unlocked in stages. Early techs only unlocking small shifts in climate. Terraforming liquids and gasses were available to improve the speed and cost.
9. Tech costs. There were more technologies that no longer exist (repeatable Hull increases, all the strategic resource techs, starbase modules etc. Lots of choices combined with a slower research speed pushed repeatable techs into the actual end-game rather than the mid-game. Pacing was lost)
10. Strategic resources. Each trader enclave used to give a unique strategic resource. There were far more hidden types of crystals, gasses and ores that could be discovered making the value of systems shift over time as you became aware of new things previously unseen in your own, neutral and enemy territory. Black holes for example would give you an empire wide +20% physics output with the one resource that carried over to 2.7.2... but now it's used for some ship modules and little else making finding it not remotely exciting.

Adjacency.
Much like Cartesian co-ordinates, the ability to have a large effect on a small scale allowed for a great deal of (often untapped) potential. Mineral silos for example could produce a maximum of +4 minerals when adjacent to mines, when early mines only produced +2. These adjacency puzzles gave you an entire mini-game for each world (but failing this puzzle only lost you a small amount of resources, no death-spirals). Colony shelters boosted food/minerals/energy giving you a hard choice between them (e.g. a tile could give +1 physics from feature, +2/2/2 food/minerals/energy from adjacency making it a limited but interesting choice for what to build). Slavers had a different layout with extra buildings providing adjacency.
If the adjacency system had not been removed when introducing alloys then modders could have added the ability for mines to boost adjacent forges, for forges to penalize adjacent farms, for monuments to boost the happiness of adjacent pops (ugly pops used to upset people nearby for example). Instead bonuses now are planet-wide in scope, since they can target 100+ pop jobs instead of 4 maximum (up, down, left and right, less if on an edge or corner) the bonuses moved from being large flat values to indecipherable and pathetically small stacks of % modifiers.

Planetary Development:
1.1 Icons for farms/mines/solar. It's purely artistic, but instead of green/red/yellow squares that got +20% better with a tech we had a little farm that needed upgrading to look bigger and have +1 output with a tech. The result is similar but the latter feels like the placeholder used before the art is complete and ready to be added, stripping out art is bizarre.
1.2 Fallen empires used to have the best farms/mines/energy/labs/unique buildings that were not available to normal empires. This was more than merely cool art, the power of those buildings made the smaller number of fallen empire worlds highly productive when they awakened and made them juicy targets for the player. Fallen empire districts are no longer special or overpowered, I actually destroy some fallen empire buildings in 2.7.2 because they are worse than using pops to do the same tasks and they cause significant unemployment due to the lack of jobs generated.
1.3 Habitat icons. They used to have their own, better but different and thematic buildings. Despite the habitat reworks we have lost the mining bay art and their all-purpose labs.
1.4 Upgrade paths. Labs used to have a choice between 3 different upgrade paths, with artwork for each. Being a jack of all trades meant being a master of none, while it was cheaper to stick to 1 type of lab, making your empire stronger in biology/physics/engineering at the expense of the others. Stacked with an edict that further encouraged this with a bonus modifier to only 1 of the 3 tech categories.
2. Food converted automatically into growth. Excess food was automatically converted to extra growth speed, distributed between growing worlds - no wasted food, no wasted growth until all worlds are fully occupied, encouraging you to scale back food production and then become more vulnerable to losses in food production (e.g. blockading a breadbasket planet starving your empire).
3. Tile blockers and features always visible. These, combined with the layout of tiles made each world have character - the colony at the base of a mountain range, the lab next to the roaming forest, the planetary shield built on the arctic world next to the military academy. There used to be clear visual and mechanical uniqueness to each world that was generated spontaneously and organically from the interactions between these features.
4. Automatic and uncapped migration. New worlds could fill in years in the late game as pops from a dozen different worlds all arrived en-mass. Now we have to pay influence to suggest a resolution to pay influence to get what once was a free feature. That's bonkers.
5. Clear visual indication for: buildings, blockers, planetary resources, unique features, species, happiness, output and boosted/reduced output, active and inactive buildings, habitability, employment and future growth, migration, temporary effects... all on one screen. What we have now is worse at showing all of the above in every way, if nothing else then for being split over so many screens and nested in collapsed menus.

Warfare:
1.1 Claims. Happened at the declaration of war, rather than whenever you have too much influence. You'd pick what you wanted to achieve and each choice would have a score needed to enforce it. This allowed you to do the following at the same time: A humiliation war -10, claiming a system -12, liberating another -8 and destroying a frontier outpost -4. As the numbers couldn't exceed 100, even the largest disparity between forces didn't allow a total war. i.e. it would cost more than 100 points to liberate or vassilise a large empire requiring you to break it apart over subsequent wars. This also allowed you to pick and choose what you were willing to achieve or concede if a war wasn't going your way. e.g. you could end a war with a fallen empire at almost any time by giving in to their tributary demand -50 and not lose any systems, but if that's unacceptable then it would take a lot of work just to stop them from taking their claims instead (they have reduced costs to claim planets), and even more successful battles to take their worlds. It was functional and easy to understand, as well as balanced to limit the power of certain war goals by making them more expensive.
2. Fast movement. Ships could fly amazingly fast between systems (thanks to the old FTL), yet combat was slow and beautiful (thanks to combat speed stat). Now ships move at a snails pace between systems and like a greyhound in combat.
3. Auras allowed for area of effect attacks (minefields). These aren't possible anymore. This also reduced the strength of platforms which used to carry 1 or 2 auras (moved to titans).
4. Bigger Fish. There was a time when the only Titans you would see belonged to Awakened Empires, making them a threat to even the most advanced player. The Player-vs-Environment interactions are lesser now that all these toys fall so easily into player hands without having to fight for them. (It would have made sense for titans/colossus to be techs dropped by Fallen Empires as debris).
5. Choices. The very first weapon/defensive tech to research was a choice, with drawbacks and advantages that made your race unique yet countered and was countered by other empires. This gave you an advantage if you could scout and pick your targets carefully.

I could actually go on... which is madness. People always talk of rose-tinted glasses, but I'm playing 1.9.1 now and it's a different beast entirely:
+Struggling to survive an awakened empire that is diligently trying to take my ringworld.
+Uplifting half a dozen primitives, funding them, watching them build their worlds and reaping the influence and naval capacity benefits.
+Neutral space extends all over despite the late year being too mineral poor and far from planets to be worthy of claiming.
+Little outposts in far flung corners capture powerful rare resources that cannot be made internally.
+Fallen Empire buildings and tech are valuable to a player advanced enough to have ringworlds.
+Pitched battles over years and across a dozen systems, tactical retreats, changing ship designs and fleet compositions to counter hyper specialised designs
+Feints, snares, invasions and counter-invasions to distract while building fleets
+Worlds fully utilized requiring little oversight except for new worlds and redevelopment during deficits.

There are problems and annoyances with 1.9.1 that's for certain... the outliner doesn't show which science ships have an active scientist and performance slows when watching a battle between massive fleets. There are large uneventful periods when nothing much happens in the mid game, so you sit-back and advance time on the fastest speed (that's when I miss the galactic community). But all things considered, It has quite literally been years since I've had this much pure joy playing. For some reason the solution to so many of the issues with 1.9.1 was to delete features, rebuild from scratch and hope things get better the second time - deleting all that stuff didn't help as much as it was hindered rebuilding things or we wouldn't have performance threads with hundreds of posts. I really hope that those features can come back in some form.

 

[CancerUnlimited]

Yeah, that's the same post that make me install 1.9.1, it's not a perfect game but it's more fun than the hot garbage that Paradox pass as a game these days.
I encourage anybody that finds the current game bad/boring/stale to try it. It might surprise you.

 

[Jinn]

Been thinking of playing this multiplayer with a couple friends soon, so to those of you who actually like the game, what would you consider the must-have DLC?

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

Been thinking of playing this multiplayer with a couple friends soon, so to those of you who actually like the game, what would you consider the must-have DLC?

All and none of them at the same time.

What I mean by that are that Paradox are incredibly jewish and things that should be base game features are put into otherwise worthless expansions.

 

[Joggerino]

Been thinking of playing this multiplayer with a couple friends soon, so to those of you who actually like the game, what would you consider the must-have DLC?

Only the host needs to have all the DLC, just so you know. But ideally you'd pirate the whole thing.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

my copy of the game started depoping the entire galaxy at the start of the game. I think I found a bug with messing with the logistics difficulty because I'm certain it shouldn't be doing that.So I made the most of the situation and started roleplaying Kharak from Homeworld.
Now I unironically want that as a start! the idea that you're on a bad planet mid apocalypse and have to save your people before they all die.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

there were mods for that, years ago. doubt they've survived the patches. best you might get now is just tomb world start while (maybe) forcing your abitability to something else.

 

[Storyfag]

Wait, isn't that one of the origins available in empire generation since like 2-3 updates ago?

 

[L'ennui]

So basically incline? Hmmm might pitch an MP campaign to a friend after we're done with our HoI4 run.

 

[Mortmal]

So basically incline? Hmmm might pitch an MP campaign to a friend after we're done with our HoI4 run.

Not really , just bored people who are seeing less flaws. It's still as shallow as before with only one way to play it.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

So basically incline? Hmmm might pitch an MP campaign to a friend after we're done with our HoI4 run.

Not really , just bored people who are seeing less flaws. It's still as shallow as before with only one way to play it.

Maybe.

I think it's getting better, but It's not there yet.

The Custodians Initiative is a step in the right direction, I believe. They realized the game had several problems was fucked up, and so they decided to go and actually take initiative to fix it with feedback from the fan base. Its funny, it definitively feels less "Abandoned Game" than HOI4 and its skeleton crew "keep the engine hot" development.

I wonder if they plan to go with Stellaris in the long-haul, or are merely using Stellaris as it is now as a base for tests towards a future Stellaris 2 that is a better game from the ground-up? Stellaris 2 could be pretty good if they used the same engine and optimizations from CKIII. AFAIK CKIII was being developed for a while then, while they were still releasing CKII expansions. Not that I think a Stellaris 2 is in the works, Vicky 3 is in development, I find a HOI5 or EUV in the works far more likely than Stellaris 2.

Personally, I like Stellaris, I think its one of the boldest, most experimental titles Paradox launched. GSG/4X hybrid, that was certainly... different from their usual fare. But it has issues.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

New Dev Diary: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...s-dev-diary-227-looking-after-the-ai.1493900/

This time, focused on the AI:

Stellaris Dev Diary #227 - Looking after the AI

• Thread starterNarkerns
• Start dateToday at 10:10

Hello and welcome to a new Dev Diary,

My name is Guido and today I’m here in my role as a Principal Designer on Stellaris to talk about AI in a bit more detail.

You probably have heard about the Custodian Initiative by now which has been created to keep improving the game on a more regular basis and in order to be quicker when reacting to player feedback. A part of this initiative is also to put some more love and attention to the AI of the game going forward - an AI initiative inside the Custodians, basically.

For this, we have set some goals for ourselves going forward:

1. Always work on AI-related topics, regardless of what else is going on
2. Move the AI towards being challenging to players in an entertaining way, rather than be optimized to min-max its way to victory
3. Move the AI towards being more distinctive, so that not all empires feel strong in the same way
4. Support future DLCs from the get-go
5. Constantly make small improvements to the AI
6. React quicker to player feedback
7. Occasionally make a push for more significant improvements

Speaking of which, for the upcoming patch in November, we have some significant updates in store.

Economic Script Update

First of all, the biggest change you will notice is how we have changed the economic plans script. This script is the core of the economic behavior of our empires. It defines what resources they strive to get when building districts and buildings. How much population growth they should go for and how much research and unity they want.

The functionality of the script hasn’t changed much, but how we are using it has changed.

Previously the script was divided into early-, mid-and late-game. Depending on the phase of the game, empires would prioritize resources differently. For example, focus on research was lower in the early game than in the later stages of the game. However, this approach didn’t take into account the various situations an empire can find itself in. Especially after a war or when a new empire breaks off an existing one. In those cases, even if the game phase was in the late game, for the respective empires it meant that they were in a much more ‘early game’ position.

Instead of having 3 different economic plans, we feature 1 base plan instead. In order to get more flexibility and to react to the empire’s situation, we’re relying much more on the ‘subplans’ inside that base plan.

Improved economic subplans

Subplans can be turned on or off, depending on the situation the empire finds itself in. Our main rationale was to ensure that an empire would be economically stable before it spends resources on ‘bonus’ things like research, population growth, defensive modules on starbases, and unity buildings.

Previously those things were prioritized too early and without enough respect to the basic income of energy and minerals, leading to empires that produced alloys, but had big deficits in energy and mineral production. And this deficit would be the start of an economic death spiral, where the resource debuffs would further reduce production and everything just escalated to the point where an empire was bankrupt on all resources. This became especially problematic after the economic system has been rebalanced to focus resource production more on the districts, rather than the buildings of a planet.

Here’s an example of what the economic situation generally looked for empires in a game that went on for around 80 years:

JkCSTjSHVsY87vJzUb5vNrO_K8aHiUIs6vu-6AQHjeP2sNF_ImdCKwdRaCpSp6mZrqnBSr3eFpfwdu-eUMG-uN16duNFGgaMqw5Ipm4Fd1V4UtwxN5tuTy2X2mEi6_EC_OODtvFb=s0

Then the first subplan kicks in. If a country uses food (therefore, Machine empires will have this subplan turned off) it will prioritize food production.

The next subplan will check conditions for focusing on consumer goods. Again, checking if the empire actually uses them or not - and then only focus on producing them if the empire has at least a monthly income of minerals of 30.
Based on the fact that in order to create consumer goods you require minerals.

Further down we activate the plans for prioritizing research and all the higher-level resources

Resulting behavior improvements

So, the script can check for various situations in AI empires - from the fact if they are a Gestalt Empire, using food to monthly income of specific resources.
This gives the AI a lot more flexibility in managing its economy.

As an example, here we have a 100-year old Galaxy with 13 AIs and every empire is able to manage its economy in a decent enough way. Notice the resource tab at the top - almost all empires have positive income in all resources; the ones with a negative income only have a small deficit:

Apart from this, there were some small, but significant code changes that helped the AI in running the show.
Conclusion

The code for the AI has been optimized heavily in the past in order to improve performance a lot. However, this has led to some unforeseen and unintended behaviors which have now been corrected. Some of the districts and buildings weren’t considered at all and city districts were weighted way too high. The AI is also now able to build temples and holo theaters, for example.

Finally, the AI has also been given a bit of support in how it will set up its starbases, especially in conjunction with the hydroponics starbase building, which can play a larger role in how you provide food for your empire. The AIs can now use more varied setups when building their starbases, making use of Curator Think Tanks, Nebula Refineries, and other special buildings where it makes sense.

And all of this was built on the foundation of the last major rework of the economic AI, so kudos to @sidestep for making this evolutionary step possible.

With your help, we’re looking forward to giving the AI the attention it deserves and making it even better in the future.

Cheers,
Guido

 

[Tyrr]

Support future DLCs from the get-go

'We decided it's a good idea to tell the AI how to handle new content at the time we sell the new content and not half a year later.'

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

Stellaris is a game that I really desparately want to like, and want to be good. There's not much else like it apart from Distant Worlds. So, honestly, I'm inclined to say it's better late than never and hold my breath for it.

 

[Ravielsk]

1. Move the AI towards being challenging to players in an entertaining way, rather than be optimized to min-max its way to victory

I absolute adore this. This implies the AI was ever min-maxing its way to victory when in reality since 1.9.1 it was barely able to handle managing one planet. Its problem was not that it was not "fun" to play against it, its problem was and is that the AI straight up incapable of playing the game without having insane cheats on its side and even then it can barely hold out.
I would like to believe they are fixing the AI but statements like these make me question if they even know what state the AI is in or if they are simply guessing.

 

[Tyrr]

1. Move the AI towards being challenging to players in an entertaining way, rather than be optimized to min-max its way to victory

I absolute adore this. This implies the AI was ever min-maxing its way to victory when in reality since 1.9.1 it was barely able to handle managing one planet. Its problem was not that it was not "fun" to play against it, its problem was and is that the AI straight up incapable of playing the game without having insane cheats on its side and even then it can barely hold out.
I would like to believe they are fixing the AI but statements like these make me question if they even know what state the AI is in or if they are simply guessing.

The AI never recovered from the planetary system rework with the mega-corps patch.

 

[TemplarGR]

Why people are still playing this garbage game and supporting this garbage company?

 

[Ravielsk]

Why people are still playing this garbage game and supporting this garbage company?

Findom is one hell of a drug.

 

[Mortmal]

Why people are still playing this garbage game and supporting this garbage company?

There's nothing else, distant worlds 2 not out.

 

[Perkel]

They will never make it fun because it has foundational problem. Everyone starts at same place while "advanced kingdms" wait for check to be on.

In other words there is no fun. All changes etc you make ultimately don't matter because everything is static and it takes eons for something to flip table and give some lower players chance to get on top. It is minmaxers dream game as there is nothing that can put their civilization in dire situation.

It has ineresting ideas like crisis, leviatans and so on but they all feel completely artificial and predictable. It would be interesting if for example suddenly flottila of scourge like aliens cut off half of your systems leaving newly colonized planets, that would force players to change their strategy. Alas nothing like this happens. It would be great if for example AI would rise on your systems and they started to fight your pops having effectively inside rebelion. Or you do orbital bombardment in some minor conflict hitting some ancient relic site which activates fleet of nanomachines terraforming few planets in system creating conflict point not only for you but few other nations.

Same with resources. Resources are waaaay too distributed effectively making every nation the same. If resources were much more scarnce and randomized then you would have case where lasers are bad router for tech because you don't have resource X but now alien blaster Y you found on some archeogy site would be nice because you have resource Y on other hand someone who doesn't have any resources he would choose to go with quantity and make up difference in firepower with maybe more ships or better defense or making allies etc.